Paris: City of Frights
by Neftzer
Summary: Methos and Amanda, at their not-quite-getting along best. A fight, a slight, culminating on a Parisian Halloween night.


**Paris: City of Frights**   
_…a Methos caper…   
in which the Horseman gives a hand,   
the Raven gets rubbed the wrong way,   
and the dead walk._

"We outgrow love like other things/And put it in the drawer/Till it an antique fashion shows/Like costumes grandsires wore"  
--from Emily Dickinson

* * *

It was a severed hand. 

Amanda flinched as one might after catching a hint of the Parisisn sewers on the breeze, regained her composure, and immediately replaced the lid of the long, bouquet box. Blood and dismemberment were things she had ceased to pay any mind some time ago. Besides, it wasn't as if it were _her_ hand--she hadn't even bothered to read the delivery's accompanying card. 

* * *

**25 October, Club Sanctuary, Paris**--It was almost three o'clock in the afternoon, and soon enough the bar would open to customers, but for now there was only Amanda, Bert Myers, and the head bartender Pascal de Verges. They had been discussing a few small things about the club in preparation for the upcoming fall and winter holidays. Boring things to Amanda, things like protocol for reserving private rooms, ordering cocktail napkins, getting ready for the fire marshal to visit and test them on the codes--things that didn't even merit a yawn. 

So she was more than a little pleased at the interruption of a delivery--doubly so when it proved to be for her. She had stationed herself across the room on one of the couches for their managerial roundtable, and so it had been necessary for her to cross the intervening space to receive the flower box. She had smiled to herself as she walked over, taking her time, deferring a resumption of the boring end of business for a little longer. 

Amanda had not been expecting a delivery of flowers or anything else, but when she lifted the lid of the box her newborn expectation was circumvented in an instant to dread. There, gripping some dozen or so lilac orchids was a severed hand, from the grayish purple look of it preserved in the cool for some time, though she would not have enjoyed admitting to anyone that judging time of death on person or part were among her many skills. 

Amanda motioned with her own still firmly attached hand to Pascal, stationed as always behind the bar, to remove the box, preferably straight to the curb. Out of view from the two men, she quickly shook off the momentary dread and departed--hastily this time--for the other side of the room, needing a return to business decisions now as she had not before. 

But despite Amanda's own enforced memory lapse about the box's contents, the result of Bert Myers' life experience had left him anything but disinterested about what took place around him. Particularly when it involved a suspicious package sent to his business partner. One whose card she chose neither to read, nor to ask after. He had caught Amanda's in-the-blink-of-an-eye response to the box upon opening it. Slight as it was, it had not been lost on him. 

Furthermore, he knew instinctively that Amanda had been bored prior to the delivery, just as he knew that she would have gladly exploited any means of changing the topic--however briefly--away from the technical concerns of Sanctuary. Not because she did not excel at the spending and acquiring and accounting for of money--quite the contrary--but because she simply would rather be somewhere else. He knew the feeling. 

Trouble was, when they had bought the club it had never occurred to either of them that near-instant success was sure to follow. He had bought his half of Sanctuary to secure the prime office space on the upper floors. Amanda--he had assumed--had gone in on a lark, anticipating a hobby, something to do from time to time, like taking up needlepoint, or fishing. Now, what they both had on their hands was one of the most visited and exclusive clubs of its kind in Paris, which oftentimes grossed more by the week than did the European branch of his security firm housed upstairs. 

And Sanctuary had turned into a nearly full-time job. So much so that he knew it was being said that rather than have a club fronting for his firm, he was actually the proprietor of a security firm that was a front for a posh club. And his old cronies, some of whom had changed their names so many times from the old days that now they simply referred to one another as the generic, "Guy," when they met, simply saw this "Guy," now Bert Myers (one of nearly fifty on a list of _his_ aliases) involved with yet another in a string of femme fatales. Nothing he could say would dissuade them. Several had gone so far as to take for granted that he was keeping her as his mistress, coyly inquiring to confirm it--and if he weren't, then would he mind if they happened to…fill in the blank. 

He had tired quickly of denying it. People would think what they would. His life had taught him that. It wasn't his mission to go around and correct false perceptions. But it did make him wonder. Most of the time he and Amanda only verged on civility, like those old toys--Weeble Wobbles--rocking from hot to cool in the climate of their relationship faster than the human eye could track. 

Besides, he was through with deceitful women. Of late he had made a conscious effort to squelch the part of his nature that seemed to draw him to them. Naturally, in the old days that was the only kind of woman--or man, for that matter--one met. But now, things had changed. He liked to think on optimistic days that even he himself had changed, had become something more than the sum of his expertise, than the fragmented product of his many pasts. Yet here he was, wrapped up in a business relationship with quite possibly the single person he trusted _least_ in this hemisphere. 

If he were to assert the sky was blue, Amanda would say, _no, it's grey_. He was not sure she had ever told him the truth about anything, but the books balanced and the staff was content. She was making him money, and her companionship, on a good day--when the two of them were Weebling toward a pleasant, early stage of friendship--was unequalled. On those days Bert thought, in his own way, he cared for Amanda. 

And he wanted to know what was in that box. 

* * *

Myers stretched from his place on the bar stool he had been occupying, feinted slowly to the left, and more quickly than Pascal could move to protest, had the lid off the flower box. 

"Mademoiselle Montrose!" he exclaimed like an epithet, sarcasm cutting across the wonder his voice echoed that even the enigmatic Amanda could be so blasé in the face of opening a box of flowers to find a chilled, dismembered left hand. 

"Hmm?" she half-turned in response from where she had been arranging bric-a-brac on the grand piano in the lounge. The absent-minded pitch of her voice completed the illusion that she had forgotten about the delivered box entirely. 

Myers glanced sideways to Pascal who was resting both hands against the bar, much too much interested in what was unfolding for Myers' comfort level. The bartender had not seen into the box. Pascal raised his eyebrows, in what Myers took to be a slight challenge. 

In response Myers stood and adjusted his belt, glanced once more to Pascal, who directed their mutual gaze across the room to Amanda's turned back. Myers looked away and back to Pascal before starting toward Amanda, and toward what he expected to be some answers. 

Pascal gave himself the authority of deferring the removal of the florist's box and instead lifted one hand to take up a soft cloth and preceded to polish the already glossy bar, his ear cocked to the duet at the piano. 

* * *

Why Myers was so caught up in the delivery for the Boss puzzled the bartender Pascal. More than anyone, he perhaps knew how tenuous were their relations with one another. Like two warring nations in peace talks--never ready to agree to terms at the same time; when one was feeling generous, the other rebuffed the advance. It was a continual, unending butting of heads and one of, if not the only, constant in the life he had carved out for himself here at Sanctuary. 

In fact, he had always marveled that of all people the hard-boiled Myers alone seemed to be vaccinated against some of the Boss' charms. Some, but not all, as the moment unfolding in front of him illustrated, even from twenty yards away. 

The only other person he had seen come anywhere to close was "I'll-have-a-beer" Adam Pierson, a man that, despite Pascal's best efforts to the contrary, he rather liked. And Pascal had always suspected that there was something more to the Boss' and Pierson's relationship than the fact that the graduate student sometimes came to the club. Sanctuary was not a place even an Englishman could mistake for a neighborhood pub, beers and ales and Guinness on tap. Not that they didn't have those things--in moderation--but there were no flirtatious bar maids or games of darts to lure such a man here as often as he came. 

Neither did Pascal assume the prices here were even similar to those at such a pub. Membership at Sanctuary brought certain privileges, to be sure, and Pierson was often present as a guest of the boss, still… It came to him as most things did, like a slow lightning flash. Perhaps, perhaps the flowers were from Pierson, or some other potential beau of the Boss'--Myers even--that would explain the reaction of both parties. Jealously, rejection, or hurt feelings. Yes, he felt certain that that was the case. Smiling like someone who has just received a very nice and unexpected present, he leaned over to pick up a glass, polishing it needlessly, and bent the better of his two ears back to the task of eavesdropping. 

* * *

"Call me old fashioned, Amanda," Myers began, off in the corner at the piano. "A hopeless romantic--whatever, but since when did--" he whispered lowly, "_spare body parts_ become part of the courting ritual?" He waited impatiently for a reply. 

She barely heard the words he said. His initial exclamation of surprise had brought her mind back to the box. It had been dissolving so pleasantly far away, unimportant. And now, there it was again, tugging at her to be responsible and try to figure out who had sent it and why, tugging at her to at least ask after the card. She continued to arrange things, with only a quick look to the side to show that she acknowledged the fact that he had joined her at all. 

"Did you see what was in that box, Amanda?" Myers pleaded, "tell me you didn't. Tell me you didn't see that and then walk away, carefree as a stick of bubble gum and start into--" he searched for the word, "dusting." 

"Nice orchids, Boss," Pascal said from his place at the bar, where curiosity had won out and he had taken his own peek into the box. "You like orchids?" 

"_Merci_, Pas," she called back to him over Bert's shoulder. 

"Yeah, nice blooms, Amanda, right. Blacker than the souls of some people I used to do business with, sure--but nice. Real quality." Myers paused and shrugged. "Why bother putting them in a vase, huh? When the severed hand in the box with them is so one-of-a-kind?" 

"Actually, Myers," she side-stepped his question. "I was pretty sure they were a very deep lilac." She shrugged. "But you say black and I say lilac--tell you what," Amanda took a tiny figurine she had been pretending to dust and waggled it in front of his nose, teasing. "Let's call the whole thing off." 

"The hand, Amanda." He squeezed out an unamused smile. 

"Quite nice," called Pascal across the space separating them. Myers turned and saw that the bartender now had his own very-much-living hand inside the box. 

Amanda began to raise her arm in a gesture to alert him to stop. 

"Whoa! The cops'll want--" Myers crossed the room in three great strides. "Don't--touch--any," his voice trailed off, "thing." 

It was too late. Pascal stood, knife in one hand, piece of severed hand in the other. 

Amanda still occupied her position, distant to them, her eyes considerably rounder at the sight of Pascal's snack. 

Bert experienced the unfamiliar-to-him sensation of nausea before he understood. 

"It's a friggin' cake?" he asked, the answer by this point moot. "Some damn fine, twisted example of pastry if you ask me," he announced to no one in particular, cocking his jaw and rolling his eyes. With a long exhale he let out most of the tension that had been building inside of him and thought about the amount of money this pay period would see going to keep Pascal quiet about the world-savvy Bert Myers, who had seen more than his share of dismemberment, fooled by some flour, and of all things, a jelly filling. 

"Let me see the damn card," he growled. 

Pascal looked to Amanda for permission--the card was, after all, in her name. She held her place, far from the box and the pastry hand, but nodded her head in assent. 

She was only just now able to think that maybe the black (she would acquiesce to Myers' opinion) orchids might look nice displayed in one of the private rooms on a mantle, or possibly on the receiving table in the entryway. 

"_The pleasure of your Presence_," Myers read aloud from the hand-lettered card, the ink red and thick to resemble blood of the innocent, or some such rot, "_is required this All Hallow Even at a masked ball given by the Headless Horseman in honor of HRH Amanda, Princess of Thieves_." 

As he read, Amanda had begun to inch her way slowly across the intervening space, her neck arching to hear what might come next in the invitation, the beginnings of a delighted expression coalescing on her face. As he finished reading the party's address and the RSVP e-mail, fax and phone, she was beside him, quick as a cat, snatching the paper card out of his hand before he could even comment on the invitation's unorthodox mode of delivery; this box of exotic flowers, clutched in what had appeared to be a lifeless hand, less a body. 

"Princess of Thieves--does it say that?" She waved the card in the direction of Pascal, and hopped, girlishly, on to a barstool. "Hell," she playacted at grousing, crinkling one eye in disapproval. "I'm the damn queen." 

"Well then, your royal highness," Myers bent slightly and pseudo-mockingly at the waist. "Whatever will you find to wear?" 

"Well, now that indeed, kind sir, is the question." Amanda, no longer skittish of the box, had begun to admire the orchids. A beat passed, and popping up from her inspection, she showed off her first finger. Sitting above the second knuckle, covered in rich, flesh-toned butter crème, was a dime-sized stone of black onyx, set into a platinum ring that the hand cake had been wearing, but in the commotion had gone unnoticed. 

"Look," she crowed to Bert over her discovery, "toy surprise!" And placing her finger to her lips, devilishly held his gaze and slurped off the frosting. 

* * *

**One week earlier - 16 October**

Amanda leaned onto the bar. It was nearly afternoon, and she was not having much fun writing and signing checks for Pascal. She found herself feeling the unspecific discomfort of the princess with a pea under her many, many mattresses, unsure why she could not sleep. Writing checks to pay bills only left Amanda acutely aware that there were many more exciting ways to go about acquiring money than by offering up signatures--and her own, at that. _Quel ennuyuex_! 

Shaking her head to quell the growing pressure she felt to steal something (_just to test herself_, she promised inside,_to see that she hadn't gotten rusty_), she asked Pascal for the date. 

"_Deux mille_, Boss," he offered, anticipating her not infrequent difficulty in recalling the correct calendar year. 

"Day?" she prompted, taking no offense at his first response. 

"Em," he charted in his head several things that had happened in the last few days, a blind date in which he had participated last Tuesday, the tenth, with a girl named Solange, the fact that the doorman Gerard had not shown up on the morning of the thirteenth to let in Yves, who waxed the floors, and finally, Amanda's own spa appointment this afternoon, which he had re-scheduled for her. 

"_Le seizie_," he told her, "_octobre_." 

"The sixteenth, already," he heard her say to herself. "When does Myers return, Pas? Do you know?" 

"Monday, the twenty-third, he said this morning when he called, if the climate in Afghanistan remains stable." 

Pascal tilted his head, remembering another thing his second boss had mentioned. "Oh, Boss, and he asked if there couldn't be, perhaps some of those _petits sandwichs de l'oignon_ sent from the U.S." 

"Grief, Pas! Those things." Amanda shook her head, to clear it of disgust. "I wish to goodness Nick had never introduced him to White Castle." She waved her hand dismissively. "Fine, order as many as seems good, have them over-nighted, whatever." In mid-wave she paused, and her face prepared to fall. "You're not going to need another check for that, too?" 

"No, I will use the card--" 

"Good. Use the one without our name on it. In fact, use Myers' card. It would never do to get out that we were ordering those--_things_ to be delivered here." 

He smiled, knowing how often Myers found himself craving the tiny, grease-filled finger hamburgers. Myers had even let him have one once. He thought of their oddly enticing odor. 

Amanda saw his expression, and guessed at his thoughts. "Pas," she moaned, "it's not like they're cuisine. It would ruin us." 

"Yes--" he agreed, and he stalled out at continuing with his train of thought, all lines of which ran back to the incompetent doorman Gerard. Asking things of Amanda was never easy. "Perhaps you would--" 

She read his mind a second time. "Speak to Gerard? I will. Don't I always?" 

And she dropped a reassuring smile on him so bright, so warm, that he found himself wondering why he didn't ask her for things more often, if this were to be his reward. 

He knew she would speak to Gerard. She was so very prompt and dependable. She was wonderful, his boss. And she would speak to that oaf in a doorman's uniform, remind him of the toad he was in comparison to her. 

But she didn't. A moment later Amanda probably couldn't have even pulled Gerard's name out of her mind from where it floated far above the depths of memory she was swimming in now. 

Already October sixteenth, more than half of the month gone and _la veille de la Toussaint_, the eve of All Saint's Day, less than fifteen days away--and her day, the thirtieth, even closer. And she had no plans. No plans, and no one with whom to make plans. 

She had been caught once on a flight with nothing to read, and had peeked over the next woman's shoulder, where she was reading _Reader's Digest_ or some similar magazine. It was an article about a woman who had escaped from certain horrible death, and every year on the anniversary of that day she treated herself in fine style as a reminder that life could be good, and sweet, and happy. 

It was an idea Amanda was able to get behind: eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow…was anyone's guess. Any person tracking her history might say she had been exercising that principle every day of her life, but October thirtieth was her real day, her christening day. The day she had won her first battle, taken her first head, received her first Quickening. And she and Rebecca had celebrated that occasion that year and every year since with the same insatiable fervor. When Rebecca had been alive there had not been one October thirtieth in a thousand-year span that she had missed spending with her student. 

Amanda made her way upstairs to her rooms without even noticing the journey, so deep in thought she had been, and she stood looking out on her third floor view of the ancient Seine. It was a river she could like. In fact, she often felt a kinship to it, eternally being reborn with the rain, or the drought--sometimes flooding, sometimes at ebb, but no one could stop it pushing to the sea. The Seine followed its nature, and she hers. 

Pausing a moment, Amanda did the math, as she always had. Over three solid years of October thirtieths she had seen in her life, spent with Rebecca. And every year since Luther had taken Rebecca's head she wondered how many more she would ultimately calculate without her friend and mentor. 

There was nothing to do but what she had done every October since Rebecca's death: stand on the precipice of a very dark, bad mood, teetering in and out of it without warning or explanation. And so she did just that. 

* * *

**Later that afternoon - 16 October**

Methos rolled over onto his back and sighed heavily, with a rumble deep inside him. He hated waiting around when he was ready to go. The crisp starchiness of the sheets on his bare skin was irritating to him. It reminded him of a brief and unpleasant relationship he had once had with a hair shirt. He hated cheap sheets. He was used to softer covers, a cotton jersey perhaps, or something richer. To pass the time he thought about potential equations necessary to calculate the thread count. 

He heard Amanda's soft breath next to him (in response, he did not doubt, to his own sigh), a retort he read loud and clear. He knew she was in no hurry and feeling none of the discomfort he was. 

He could smell her--not an unusual thing, he supposed, she was usually wearing whatever the going parfum of the moment was. But not today, today she was scrubbed down from whatever they had done to her first at the spa, and what he could smell was quite solidly Amanda. Something very much like a cross between freshly mown hay (very high class hay, he did not doubt), and the fragrance ripe grapes gave off just before being stomped into wine (a very good vintage of wine, he also did not doubt). 

_Zeus, they should bottle it up and sell the heady stuff over the counter._ Then, peeved at himself, he exhaled strongly out through his nose, as if to reject this invasion of his olfactory privacy. 

"For pity's sake, Methos," she finally acknowledged him aloud. "If you're that unhappy why did you agree to this in the first place?" 

_Because, woman_, he wanted to say, his words so sharp they might cut his own tongue, _It was unclear that the free massage offered would occur in the same room as your own, and not being made of stone--at least not every part of me _(he winced at his own bad humor), _I had not prepared for the occasion to be quite so awkward, nor my own corporeal form quite so contrary in response._

Neither had he anticipated how weighed down with pressure for him a room could be where Amanda lay--only a yard or so off on another table--on her stomach, reading one of four or five issues of _Paris Match_ that had been available in the day spa's lobby. She kept having to adjust herself on her elbows to accommodate the position, and he thought that soon he might go mad entirely from the sound of her skin against the air, her bare skin that seemed to hum inside his head somewhere, like power lines singing in an open field. 

He imagined that she would gladly wait around all day, the what-should-have-been-harsh lighting unable to take the pale blush out of her shoulders naked above the sheet as they flowed into her perfect neck. Neck wasn't really even the word for it, awkward and harsh as the English was. He thought of the French; _cou_. A little better. He called up the Russian; _shi-ya_. More likely. More like the graceful curve and exquisite musculature, smooth as sculpture... 

_Damnation!_ he shouted to himself, flexing his fingers out flat from where they had begun to curl up into fists of tension with the new onslaught of--well, tension. He wouldn't give it another name. He wouldn't decline it in other languages. 

He would let it out as irritation, then. He sighed a third time. This was pure foolishness. It was silly, absolutely bats. He didn't even _like_ Amanda--well, no more than was reasonable. Yet here he was, close to physical combustion over a woman who was so absorbed in a glossy mag she didn't even remember he was in the room. Well, he would go, then. He would leave and still have some of his dignity in tact. 

He shifted under the sheet again. 

Now it was Amanda's turn to sigh. She did so, letting a rattle attach itself onto the end of the exasperated sound. "Why don't you just sit your impatient Limey, white--or whatever-you-are-today arse down and quit sucking away all the air in the room for your sighs?" She said it harshly, like someone ready to pick a fight. Someone who was close to the snapping point herself. It wasn't like her. 

No matter, he opened his mouth to respond disagreeably. But then the door opened, and he acquiesced, letting the masseur attempt to tackle the newly-sprung tightness of his limbs. 

* * *

Amanda was trying very hard to concentrate on _Paris Match_'s large print in front of her, the pictures of occasional royalty, middle class fashion tips--anything to drag herself even momentarily out of the dark mood she was trying unsuccessfully to face down. 

_But if that were true,_ she heard some contrary part of herself ask, _why bring Methos along as company?_ Why invite the single grouchiest person she had ever met to her spa appointment, an appointment that was made to relieve tension, not create it? She had no answer. 

She heard the slap of the masseur's hands against the Old Man's back, trying to tease out--she almost chuckled--five thousand plus years of angst and anxiety. Tomas, her personal masseur, did not realize he had his work cut out for him. 

She wondered when Tomas' apprentice would arrive to begin on her. She had tensions of her own, but she had let Methos take Tomas, as he had arrived first and Mr. Grumpypants' sighs were getting on her last nerve. This had brought about the end of his sighing, but she still felt he was peeved at something, so she offered a little conversation as a way of truce. 

"Let's see," she began, reading from a quiz and chart in her magazine. "Topaz for fidelity, amethyst for sincerity," she tried a smile. "Nope, not that one." 

"What are you doing, Amanda," he asked, sighing again. He knew that at this point his taut muscles were all but unpliable, even under the hands of this fellow Tomas. 

"Trying to discern your power stone, that's all," she replied, a little something beginning to catch in her tone, answering the edge in his. "I'm thinking Moonstone or Pearl for health and longevity." 

"Well my birth date is April," he cited the month on his current set of forged identification, rolling his eyes at the junior high turn things had taken. "And if memory serves, that's diamond." 

"For innocence?" Amanda countered, snorting. "Yeah, right." 

Methos shifted away from the table, turning on his side and holding his hand up to signal for Tomas to pause a moment. He rolled his neck, trying to loosen it himself. 

Amanda was playing to an audience of one now. She was the only person still listening, or still trying to convince herself that she was feeling flippant and shallow-minded, caught up in her magazine. "More like coal," she continued to riff on the idea of Methos' power stone, "or onyx, if you want something for cufflinks." She had not looked up, her expression's cross between lighthearted teasing and the beginning of desperation buried within the pages of the magazine. "That's the color of your heart." 

Methos had had enough. He threw the sheet aside and stood. The motion finally caught her eye and she looked up, taking her face out of the magazine for the first time since they had arrived. Besides, he was wearing only a pair of grey boxer briefs. She had not pegged him for that. 

She thought she could hear the fluorescent light, Buzzing above them. The briefest moment of silence ensued, and the muted sounds of other customers going by the room's doors could be heard. He waited for them to pass. 

"I am sick, and desperately tired," Methos began in a voice that might have bordered on a shout if it had not been so controlled, "of being treated like your gay best friend." 

Tomas and Amanda looked at each other uneasily in his wake, as Methos crossed over to the place his clothes lay and began very deliberately to dress. 

"When you are finished," he pulled on his coat, "I will be in the car." He would have preferred a grander exit. 

* * *

Once the Old Man had left, Tomas waited a discreet second, and then motioned toward Amanda for his cue. 

"It's alright," she told the masseur as much as she told herself, unable to unscrew her face from its sour expression. _Methos ruined everything._ "I'll be going, I think." 

She dressed slowly, just to make her unpleasant companion wait--awkwardly she hoped--with the driver. And then she stopped by the front desk to arrange for the day's bill to be sent to one Adam Pierson, and for herself, the largest gift basket, also on his new tab. She'd see to it he was a generous bastard, if only by proxy. 

She could have predicted what was waiting for her in the car. It was a very long ride back. 

* * *

The afternoon proved longer still, when after the strained and mostly silent drive, for reasons unknown Methos invited himself in to Sanctuary, and claimed a barstool in front of Pascal. The world's oldest immortal seemed to have no intention of leaving any time soon, and if he did not vacate the premises, Amanda knew she would not have a chance to re-hash the afternoon to the sympathetic ear of her favorite bartender, who in less than an hour would be caught up in the crush of the evening's traffic, pouring drinks and lending his ear to _actua_l patrons. Not this crusty old--she had run out of names for him sometime during the car ride--who wasn't going to pay for what he drank anyway. 

She felt a renewed sense of desperation, as though no one was listening to her, even though she had not spoken. A few stools away from them, pretending to be lost in her day planner, she grumbled to herself. 

"What's that?" asked Methos, his ears sharper than even his tongue. He had been willing to let the events of the afternoon go, in fact he had decided to forget it all together once the clothes of those involved were replaced. After all, the kind of tension that came from being at odds with Amanda was something he was more than prepared to handle--in spades. It came nowhere near making him need to assay the declension of irregular verbs in order to keep his head about him. 

"I said," she raised her voice, staring into her planner like a nervous singer into a microphone, the pressure inside her ready to whistle out her ears for relief, "why don't you go home." 

Without raising his chin, Methos looked up at Pascal through his lashes. "Now why would I want to do that?" 

"This is my home, _Adam_," she wasn't sure where she was headed with this, in her frustration everything seemed tinted slightly red, bleeding into itself, "and I think it's time for you to go." She turned her head to the side to get him in her sights. "To _your_ home." 

"This isn't your home, Amanda," he bickered. "It's a _bar_. It's a place where people gather, to drink beer and hang out," and he rolled his eyes. 

If calling her baby, her Sanctuary, a bar hadn't gotten her hackles up, the dismissive roll of his eyes in the direction of Pascal had. A siren in her head went off like the sound a submarine gives before a dive. Damn her if she was going to let him do it again. He had embarrassed her earlier in front of Tomas, and now he was gunning for Pascal. 

"Right," she agreed, spitting it out like acid. "Which would be in direct opposition to _your_ home, where no one gathers because you don't even have a table, or a kitchen." 

His eyebrows rose. She was calling him out. 

"So don't try to educate me on what it's like for people to want to be around you, because it's not even a question of who will win, darling," she stretched the "r", and locked his gaze with her own. For a long moment it held. 

He was the first to look away, moving only his eyes. "De Verges," he addressed Pascal by his last name, "may I borrow the bar telephone?" 

Pascal looked to Amanda for direction. With a slight squint of one eye, she consented. She had yet to blink. 

"Certainly, monsieur." Pascal pulled the antique, black rotary bar phone up and sat it gently on the glass bar top. He lifted the receiver and handed it to Pierson. 

After he dialed, and the phone began ringing, Methos again addressed Pascal, "what days are available later this month for private parties?" 

"Which rooms were you interested in booking?" 

The audible ring coming from the other end of the line stopped as someone answered. 

"Hang on just a moment, won't you, Jules?" Methos asked into the receiver. 

Amanda thought for a moment about challenging the Old Man, certain that was the only way such a rage as she felt could end, but she had only a flash on how long the battle would take, and she preferred not to speculate as to its outcome, she was too tired to stay angry in that moment, confused as she was. So she gave in and asked. "What do you think you're doing?" 

Ignoring her, Methos clamped one hand over the bottom of the receiver and spoke to Pascal. "Yes, I think we'll be needing all of them." 

The bartender's hand went to look for the schedule book, but in surprise to his response, caught the lower shelf instead. This would be a first indeed. All of Sanctuary booked--for a single party. 

"We have the thirty-first still not booked, Monsieur Myers was thinking of perhaps an in-house fete." 

The other end of the phone line crackled back to life. 

"What's that, Jules?" Methos asked almost absently. "Yes, right, for the thirty-first? Um-hmm, we should probably speak." He asked the person on the other end to come by later that day, and hung up, a cat-ate-the-canary grin on his face. 

"Who was that?" Amanda asked, her curiosity for the moment dampening her annoyance. 

"Oh, that?" he looked as innocent as a baby--or at least he tried. "Julia Hart, maybe you've heard of her?" 

"You know her phone number?" Pascal asked incredulously. "Half of Paris would kill for that secret--weren't you just saying, Boss--" One icy look from Amanda, and his mouth closed. 

"It would seem," Methos stood, downed the last of his beer from the glass, and slid one arm into his coat. "That I am in need her services, as _I_ am throwing a party." He hefted the coat over his other shoulder and finished pulling it on. In a heretofore unseen maneuver, he reached into his pants' pocket and pulled out a few francs, which he laid beside the empty glass he had left. "Pascal," he said, with a small wave of goodbye, and turned to the very bent out of shape proprietress, and took her hand. "Later, Amanda. And thank you for a--" he inhaled deeply, still smiling, "simply lovely day." He gave a small flourish, halfway between the gesture of hand kissing and hand shaking, and he was gone. 

Amanda slowly deflated, letting the hostility in her wane. She felt like she had witnessed a near-train wreck in the last twenty or so minutes. Yet somehow she hadn't. 

"Tell me one thing, Pascal," she asked, closing her planner. 

"What's that, Boss?" he was writing in the party booking. 

"How does he do it?" 

"Do what?" 

"That," and they turned and looked at each other, neither knowing the answer. 

* * *

**28 October **

It was half a week after the arrival of the flowers and the official announcement of Adam Pierson's party when Father Liam Reilly stopped by Sanctuary, and he and Amanda adjourned to her upstairs apartment to catch the dying rays of the Gallic sun through the nearly floor to ceiling windows of her boudoir. 

The good father knew it was probably not a place many of his parishioners would approve of his being, and on most occasions and with most women he would have agreed, but there was something about Amanda's flat--ninety-nine percent of which seemed to be bedroom, with its ornately painted Pre-Raphaelite ceiling mural of cherubs in the open heavens that made him feel as though he were right at home, sitting under something holy. 

"So, this party," began Liam, who had himself received a rather more conventionally delivered invitation than Amanda. "What will be your costume?" 

"Oh, I don't know," Amanda said, pretending that his question, mirroring that of Bert's, had not kept her awake every night for almost the past three days since she had received Methos' hand and orchids. The party was in her honor--or so the invitation had said. She could not wear just _anything_. Besides, trying to puzzle out her options in that corner kept her away from the other dusty corners of her mind and the cathexis surrounding October thirtieth. 

Liam wasn't a confessor for nothing. He knew she was telling the truth, and he knew how very un-Amanda that was, to be both telling the truth and to be unexcited about a party. "What're you thinking about these days, Amanda?" He knew her better than to expect a prod that simple to bring it all spilling out, but you had to start somewhere. 

She shrugged. "Things. Nothing really," and she made herself smile for him, knowing there was nothing Liam could do about her funk, and not wanting to make him feel bad for it. 

"Well, you'll tell me when you're ready, I'm sure," he lifted a sympathetic eyebrow and toasted with his glass of sweet tea--a non-Parisian delicacy he only knew of Amanda to make. "'Tis, after all, the season for hauntings." 

She offered nothing further, not even a nod or flinch of admission, so Liam let it go, and proceeded to one of his orders of business. 

"While we're on the subjects of invitations, though, I've got two of me own. Firstly, I would like to invite you, should the night not keep you up over long to my Hallowmass. And secondly, I've been meaning to make plans to visit the traveling exhibit at the Louvre before it leaves. Plans that could include you, should you like." 

He hoped she would agree to come along. There was something almost naughty about visiting a museum with Amanda in tow. It always took on the air of counterintelligence, which reminded him (in the best way) of his time spent with the Resistance. 

"Which one is that?" she asked almost absently, picking at a small snag in the arm of her chaise lounge. "_Swords, Swashbucklers, and Swains: the costume of romance throughout the ages_?" She seemed to recall seeing an advertisement for it somewhere, a brochure that had come in the mail along with information about renewing her Louvre patron status. 

"That's the one," he agreed. "John Horne stopped by last week after mass as he was in town, and he told me that he'd donated some of Rebecca's things to them." He waited to see if she would respond to the fact he had seen the husband of her oldest friend. She didn't, so he continued. "Thought it might be nice to go. We could have some lunch beforehand, correct the tour guides on a thing or two if you like." 

"I don't know, Liam, taking a guided tour through someone's closet? But I will promise to fill a seat All Saints' Day--no matter how late I stay out." 

"We can light a candle for Rebecca," he offered. "On All Souls Day, too, if you like." Still she didn't ask, so he told her anyway. "You know he's married again." 

"Who?" She continued her study of the snag. 

"John," Liam didn't mention anything about the new wife. If Amanda asked, he could fill in those blanks later. 

She shifted in her seat, knowing that Liam had won. He had finally hit upon something that deserved an answer. When she spoke, her voice was flat. "Would you have him grieve forever? He deserves happiness." 

Liam was surprised at the rote sound of her reply. So he had teased it out. It was Rebecca after all. "That he does," Liam agreed. "We all do, love." His voice softened, "I was only tellin' ye. No making a statement one way or the other." 

Amanda picked up her tall glass of tea and the ice tinkled against itself as she swirled it about in her hand, making noises like the high-pitched laughter of young girls at a party. 

"Well," she changed the subject. "Who will you be coming to the party as, so I'll know you?" 

"I shouldn't tell, I suppose, but I never can refuse you anything you want. Not really." He smiled. "I was thinking about Saint Francis or good Saint Peter even, holding the keys and all--one of the big guys, you know, but then I got serious, and settled on Don Juan." 

Now that had surprised her. "No," she half-laughed, looking up from the snag. "Really?" 

"Really, I've got the whole rig hanging up in my vestry. Likely scare the cleaning lady, no doubt. I figured this way, should I overindulge I won't be sullying the name of a holy man, and as the Don I won't have to worry about being responsible for my own actions, either. Besides, what better way for a man of the cloth to fool the evil spirits of the night than by masquerading as a notorious libertine?" 

* * *

**30 October**

Musee du Louvre--The lights in this wing were dimmer than Amanda had recalled, and the bag she had chosen to bring along heavier. Mannequins stood everywhere like a neo-Medusa had arrived, turning all those in her gaze to space age polymers rather than the traditional stone. She looked at her watch. Seven minutes to closing time. 

She had decided to visit the exhibit after all, but without Liam. She had thought about inviting him along on her bit of larceny, but had finally agreed there was no need to devil him today. After all, it was her day. She should do this alone. 

Security had closed all special exhibit halls a half an hour early, just as her test-run the day before had predicted. These rooms were now considered secure, and no one would be checking them again until the next shift began in an hour and twenty minutes. 

Moving efficiently to the mannequin in the far corner where _Europe in the 1600s_ lay, she had it undressed in time to grab the accompanying mini-portrait as well. She thought about taking the plaque labeled with the name of the donor, John Horne, and what was known about the piece, but decided against it. Besides, there wasn't anything a placard could tell her about this suit of clothing that she didn't already know herself. 

She made her way silently and expertly to the ladies room, bypassing lasers and sensors in the ventilation system too numerous to name. Arriving there, she waited the intervening minutes for last call--escape would be easier in the rush of patrons leaving at the last minute. When it was sounded, she flushed the toilet for effect, and pulled on her hat and trench coat (conveniently it was actually raining) over her now-pregnant abdomen, and made a dash for the door, and a taxi to her waiting car. 

* * *

Once back at Sanctuary in her own rooms, she poured herself a glass of champagne and toasted the silver grey ensemble like an old friend, as well as the miniature oil portrait of Rebecca wearing it. She felt a familiar rush of a heist well pulled that brought color into her cheeks when she looked at the outfit laid out on her bed. 

With eager fingers she dialed downstairs to the bar, and to Pascal. 

"Pas," she began, without explanation. "I need a tailor. One who won't ask a lot of questions, one who might be familiar with vintage wear." 

In less than twenty minutes Pascal rang back, having found her just the person to come along later in the evening, measure what was necessary, and re-fit the trousers and shirt on site. 

She called down again, requesting a very specific list of cosmetics, which Pascal wrote with painstaking effort to get them exactly right. A moment later she called for a special kind of stockings, then for the name of the best periwigger in Paris. At this point he had to admit he had no idea what she was talking about. 

_Someone who makes wigs_, she said, sighing slightly, but unable to abandon her buoyant mood. 

Thus went the evening for Pascal, torn two ways--one way for Amanda who seemed to need a great deal more assistance than usual this night, and another for the workmen and the designer Julia Hart, who had arrived in a flurry of silk and hammers and props to begin decorating for the private party to be held the next evening. 

Both women were equally demanding in their need for perfection in all they asked of him. By night's end he was feeling like a thinner, paler version of his usual self. When all the workmen, and mademoiselle Hart had departed finally at three in the morning, their work for the moment done, his one thought was to the bed waiting for him in his basement flat below the club. 

It was then that the bar phone rang. 

Refusing the boss never an option in his mind, he dutifully climbed the stairs to see the costume she had so carefully assembled over the last few hours. 

* * *

Amanda sat at her vanity for one final look before putting on the stolen ensemble's plumed hat and meeting Pascal at the door. She didn't need to check the portrait to see that with the help of modern makeup she had recreated Rebecca's face in hers to a perfection that even Kevyn Aucoin could not dismiss. The addition of the curly, redheaded wig only re-enforced the twin-like similarity between the two women. Less than an hour before no one would have said--even to be polite--that Amanda resembled Rebecca Horne; not her nose or her eyes, her ears or her figure, yet now the two were as inseparable as Rebecca had been from her own portrait. 

Amanda didn't expect anyone to know who she was at the party--few of her current friends had met Rebecca. Liam of course would know, but no matter--she would tell the others she was dressed as a lady swashbuckler, and with her over-the-shoulder cape and her rapier at her side, who would there be among the witches and Frankensteins--the traditional mortal costumes for Hallowe'en--to argue? 

She cleared her throat as she sheathed the rapier and tried out a trick she had not had need of in some time. 

"Amanda," she said to her reflection, in a voice filled with concern and bemusement, "what do you think you're doing?" 

She tried it again several times until she got the pitch entirely right. She was no impressionist, no Rich Little, but she had spent three years learning to mimic her teacher, to drag her own guttersnipe speech deliberately, and purposefully, into the drawing room. She had done it because she had to, and it was a talent she had retained. And that line, _what do you think you're doing_--it had been the beginning of a common enough exchange between the teacher and sometime reluctant student. 

Speaking her trial sentence for the fourth time, there was a knock on her door, and she walked to meet it, and to present herself to Pascal. 

* * *

Pascal had not realized the Boss had had company, and when he saw the fair-skinned redhead in costume open the door, he mumbled an apology for interrupting. 

She assured him, in an upper-class British accent, that he shouldn't worry, she had been expecting him, and she directed him to take a seat. 

Almost ten minutes passed that way, with Pascal in Amanda's receiving area, struggling to make polite conversation with a stranger while waiting for the Boss to appear so that he could finally turn in for the night. 

Eventually, Amanda caved, and spoke in her own voice. "Oh, c'mon Pas, don't tell me you still haven't caught on!" 

He looked around, as though the woman before him was a ventriloquist dummy and he was searching for the person throwing their voice. In response, his boss' familiar laughter brought him back to the other person he _could_ see in the room, and he squinted to try and decipher her through the disguise. 

He had no idea why his beautiful boss would have chosen to transform herself into someone (though having merit, he was sure, in their own right) who was obviously (how could it be otherwise?) so much less than the original Amanda. He shook his head slowly and stood up, dead on his feet. 

"It's a good trick, Boss," he answered. "Fooled me." _Perhaps_, he thought, _this is that to which the stars aspire_ (for his boss was the closest he would ever come to the heavens, he often thought), _to dim their own brilliance somehow, if only for a night_. 

It was a curious costume, though. It reminded him of something he and Solange, his blind date, had seen at the Louvre. She had liked one outfit very much, and they had looked at it for some time, studying its card and the picture of its owner. He narrowed his eyes at Amanda, but in his weariness the motion caused them to swim with tears rather than to sharpen their focus. "I will be glad, Boss, to see you back to yourself." 

Amanda smiled. It had been a good and successful trick, then. "Good night, Pascal." 

"Good night." He did not pretend to understand things such as this. He did not imagine that she expected him to. He was, after all, only a bartender, an exhausted and sleepy one at that. 

* * *

**31 October - The Horseman's Party**

**Club Sanctuary, just before midnight**--Amanda continued to push her way through the half-dancing, standing-room-only crowd that seemed to spill into every conceivable space of her club. 

In the past few hours, since the party's beginning at sundown, she had found those in attendance littered everywhere, from the garbage skiff curbside, to the fourth floor storage lockers--not to mention an especially amorous quartet straddling (in an acrobatic fashion that she could admire, if only for its vulgarity) Bert Myers' beautiful, imported mahogany desk. How they had picked the lock to get in there, she would never know. Practice and experience had taught her that it was an especially tricky one, even to a professional's hand. 

Her own apartments she had given up policing two hours ago, when she had turned off the elevator, which due to overloading had been getting constantly stuck between floors. Not that the occupants had seemed to mind, so long as someone pried the doors open and kept piping in the booze. 

The evening had quite surprisingly given birth to the single most remarkable--for what it was--party she had ever attended. When she had descended the stairs earlier, intent on making an entrance (she was, after all, the alleged guest of honor) she had been assaulted in the head and stomach with a Buzz so powerful she thought her knees might buckle--or the ground might crack and swallow her whole, or the sun might bleed its heat onto the melting earth. That feeling should have been enough warning to keep her away, but it hadn't, the pull of a celebration managed to squelch it all. 

She had swallowed down the feeling, the nausea and dizziness, difficult as that had been, and walked into the foyer where those invited had already started to arrive. There couldn't have been more than fifty or a hundred guests present at that time. Oddly, she recognized few of the faces. Despite the fact it was a masked party, she had felt sure she would be able to pick out her good friends from the among pack, but as she began to mix and mingle, she came to a shocking realization. Besides the help, and the exception of one or two of the guests, everyone in attendance could die only one way--head separated from their body, preferably by a sword. She had recoiled from unbelievable thought of what Methos had done. 

With that knowledge swimming around in her brain and mixing with the intentionally frightening decorations and ever-growing crowd of revelers, she had quit searching for someone to introduce her arrival, and changed objectives, instead embarking on a hunt for the devious Old Man. She heard conversations everywhere around her, swirling with curiosity about the Headless Horseman host from the invitations. It was beginning to sound like a scene from the movie _Clue_, with all participants speculating as to the identity of Mr. Body. 

Constantly bumping up against people in the crush, Amanda was sure she had found Methos several times, but each time she was disappointed. She had misgauged his hair here, his build there. And in the unfortunate wake of going up to the wrong people (a bit too cheekily early on) she had regrettably incited several over-zealous marks to begin pursuing her through the tight crowd as well. 

On a better note, she had left a few flabbergasted immortals in her passage, bare whispers she caught being passed along under their breath that it seemed the rumors of Rebecca Horne's death were quite possibly just that--rumors. Amanda was not prepared to hold detailed conversations with any of Rebecca's long-lost acquaintances, so though amused by her own chicanery, she moved away from the whispers as quickly as possible. 

What's more, she was starting to overheat under the multi-layers of her silk and satin costume. She made her way around to the back of the bar, hoping for a spot of air, slinking to the ground when she caught a glimpse of one ardent follower. 

But even the floor wasn't bare. Another couple had had a similar idea, but with a very different motive. 

"I beg your pardon," she mumbled in Rebecca's voice, after she had mistakenly sat down on the female partner's leg. 

"No worries, Duckie," she heard, and the man, dressed as what she could only characterize as a discount version of Robespierre, briefly turned his head around. His face was long and thin and very well known to her, but it was obvious he did not recognize her, either as herself or Rebecca. 

"Well, well," he began, and chuckled, turning away from woman number one, judging this new entry to the competition to be somewhat preferable. "Always did fancy the redheads, myself." 

"Basil?" Amanda asked, in her own voice. 

"'Manda?" the eyes behind his leather mask registered disbelief. 

"What are you doing in Paris?" 

"Take yourself out of here, won't you?" he hissed. "I've got a good thing started here." He gestured to the other young woman, dressed as the Statue of Liberty who had been kind enough to wait for him, "alright?" 

Amanda mumbled something less than complimentary about the craftsmanship of his frockcoat, and slowly peeked her head over the bar to check and see if the coast was clear. Her view obscured by the backs of people ringing the bar, she pinpointed a forgotten glass of something (at this point she didn't really care what) abandoned on the bar, grabbed it and downed it in one swallow, put her knee into Basil's back--with all apologies--and climbed atop the bar for a better view. 

The man (had his name been Coley?) was no longer in sight, and she began another slide through the mass, this time toward a fellow who had been hanging out near the grand piano for the last half-hour or so. He was dressed as a masked Ichabod Crane--his black tricorne was easy enough to spot--and was surrounded by a large number of women; a post-guillotine Marie Antoinette, Joan of Arc, Scarlett O'Hara (how she was getting around in that hoop skirt in this crowd Amanda would have liked to have known), the pirate Anne Bonney, and a Mountie--Sam Browne, Stetson and all. Amanda took a moment to chide them in her mind for their terrific display of unoriginality, when she had to recant. On second glance it looked very much like that could indeed _be_ Anne Bonney. 

But by the time she had joined the group, the lady pirate had moved on, and so she would never be sure, but she was so certain that the trim and lanky figure was that of Methos that she sidled up behind him and gave his britches-clad backside a firm squeeze. Then, in a maneuver meant to scatter the standing bevy of lovely ladies hanging on his every word, she ran her hands up under his homespun shirt and coat from behind and onto the bare skin of his chest. 

Still using Rebecca's voice, she purred some decidedly unladylike ideas into his ear, and then she sank some of her nails--just enough to get his attention--into his flesh. She heard him suck in his breath at that. But she was not prepared for when he turned around, because the very-agreeable-to-all-her-dirty-suggestions face that met hers was not at all that of the Old Man's. 

Without staying to apologize, or explain, she melted quickly back into the crowd, and decided that she had had enough. Not even the fact that she recognized the far-off voice of that braggart Kit O'Grady, starting into his millionth tale about what had once been their racehorse Double Eagle, could sidetrack her from getting to the door. 

Unfortunately, the interlocking bodies of some twenty or thirty drunk, most likely high, and unquestionably disagreeable immortals that had taken over the entryway could. It was after two, and as things would have it, it was time for a good, old-fashioned brawl to break out. 

She swore to herself, although she could have easily shouted the words, there was no one listening, no one to hear. Without allowing herself to think about what she was about to do, she grabbed the giant vase that usual occupied the table in the entryway--the one still filled with Methos' black orchids. She put one hand on its lip, and the other on its base, hefted it over her head, and through a nearby window. 

The sound of the breaking pane of glass against the four-thousand franc porcelain vase did not even make a ripple against the flood of noise that escaped before Amanda through the newly-blown hole. 

She scrambled through the opening she had built for herself, praying for Pascal's safety as she left him behind somewhere inside, and on her way out narrowly missed a poorly thrown right jab by whom she thought might have been multi-billionaire Graydon Hammer. 

* * *

**One hour later**

On foot and via metro, Amanda had made her way across several sections of Paris, keeping some distance between herself and the kafuffle back at Sanctuary, but she was unable to drop the feeling that someone was following her. The sensation was coming from somewhere deep in her lower spine, a haunting uneasiness like a touch of seafood gone bad in your stomach. 

When she finally did manage to shake it, and she had doubled back several times to reassure herself that she was indeed alone, she found that she had ended up in Methos' part of town. 

Walking down the long street to his corner building, she decided to wait until such a time as he found his way home. The night was cool and fresh, the very antithesis of the bash going on at Sanctuary, and she chose to sit out in it, rather than invite herself inside. Amanda positioned herself nearby one of the few streetlights. She wondered if she had long to wait. _Oh, well_, she sighed. It wasn't like she could go home--not without a Surete riot squad escort. 

* * *

Methos turned onto his block, his hands typically thrust into the pockets of his long coat, whose collar was turned up against the beginning chill of fall. He was playing with the smoke-like designs his warm breath was making in the cooler air. He had a few good beers in him, and he was not unhappy. 

He rounded the corner, and at about the same time as he saw the figure standing under the lightpost, he felt the dreaded sensation of a Buzz invade his head. He stopped at once, and prepared to retrace his steps. It was too late, the other immortal had seen him and was already reaching for their rapier. 

* * *

Amanda saw the tall, slim man in the long coat coming down the street toward her. He had pulled up short in the shadows, and her vision was at a deficit from the time she had been standing in the light's beam. It was the man she had been dodging at the party. He had been the one following her, just out of reach of her radar. She drew her rapier from its sheath and spoke as she had all night, in the voice of Rebecca. 

"If I were you I'd turn around and go." She removed her plumed hat, the better to see during the necessary violence she felt was to come. 

* * *

Methos didn't need any suggestions from another immortal about how to make a decent exit. When the lady spoke he had been a millisecond away from complying--until she had doffed her hat. 

The Buzz he had been feeling shot straight to his chest, seeming to squeeze in around his heart, which began to beat arrhythmically. He had seen a lot in his life--in his lives. He had seen things he could explain and things he could not. This did not seem to fall into either category. 

* * *

Amanda took two steps closer to the man, whose face was now hidden--not by a mask as it had been before, but by his upturned collar. He had not spoken a word, nor made a gesture in reply to her salutation. He simply stood, as if she had turned him to stone. 

* * *

Rebecca was standing here in front of him, coming at him with a sword. _What tomfoolery!_ He had read the Watcher accounts of her death himself, seen the sword, the police interview with the bereaved husband, John. Once, on a melancholy day, he had even visited her grave. 

Yet what did that prove, really? Eyewitness accounts, cast-off weapons, grieving mates, funeral plots--he'd facilitated similar schemes in his day, no doubt would again when it became necessary. It meant nothing. Only that she had been very thorough. A strange and wistful smile began to play across his face, it was a rare expression which he had only worn perhaps six or seven times in his life--things did not surprise him as a rule. 

Had this encounter been during the day, or on a different night when he had a little less liquor swimming around warmly inside himself, his cynicism no doubt would have held, but in addition to all these things, the twinkling night lights of Paris and the beginning chill of fall had put him in a mood for ghosts, and left him almost anticipating a reunion with the newly-risen past. 

She looked exactly as he had remembered, though he had never seen her in this outfit. No, their time together had been before silk stockings and rapiers and hats with feathers. Her hair was the same as ever, burning in the light from the lamppost and sparking like a hearth fire. 

He stepped forward, wanting to grab her around the waist and--his mind balked. He could not think beyond touching her with his hands, grabbing her hair in his fist almost roughly, as he had done so long ago. He started to call to her, to say her name, _Becca_, but his voice caught and he had to clear it first with a nervous rumble. 

* * *

"You know," Amanda began, stepping closer to the coated stranger with every syllable, "I'm rather sorry about what happened back there. It was a simple mistake, I assure you. One which I am more that willing to--Methos?" She said his name in her own voice, as she had earlier with Basil. 

* * *

The name Methos had been preparing to speak morphed into a wheezing cough as he realized his mistake, and Amanda rushed forward to do her version of ineffectually slapping him on the back as a way of assistance. He wondered wryly if she had ever read the Red Cross' new take on the back blow as an ineffective, and possibly dangerous maneuver when used on choking victims. 

"What are you doing?" he asked, in reference to more than the potential physical damage she was enacting on him at the moment. 

"I happen to have just returned from a very prestigious party," she answered. 

Looking at her, even though she was using her own voice, was a little more than he could bear at the moment. He walked over to a nearby bench and seated himself, facing away from the door of his apartment. She followed. 

"Please," he offered no explanation, "take that off, won't you?" He tried not to look directly at her, directly at Rebecca--Amanda--whoever. He extended his handkerchief. 

"Oh," she said, having worn the disguise so long she had nearly forgotten about it. She took his handkerchief as offered, but had a better idea. "Well, let's go inside then and I can wash some of this off." She grabbed his arm to pull him toward his door. 

He stared off into the distance, hesitant. He was still recovering from both his flight of fancy, and the initial rush of nerves at having someone draw a sword on him. "Just a moment," he said, and he pulled out of her grip. 

"What did you think you were doing anyway?" she asked. "That party was a total--joke." 

"So I invited a few people I knew," he argued. "Holy ground, remember?" 

"And what, they haven't got legs?" 

"C'mon, Amanda, they're all grown-ups." 

She was beginning to see his plan. He had probably ransacked his old Watcher Rolodex and handed it over lock, stock, and barrel to the planner, only re-titled at the top: instead of reading, _Immortals Currently Based in Paris_, it now read, _Party Guest List_. 

"And if they just happen to," she speculated, "I don't know, make an appointment to meet tomorrow and…slice?" 

"Oh," he feigned mild surprise, "do you suppose that might happen?" 

"Well, after that free-for-all I witnessed in the foyer..." she searched his face, which remained uninvolved. "And, you know, the two guys that broke Pascal's jaw…" 

"Someone broke Pascal's jaw?" 

"Um-hmm," she lied, "you remember, the ambulance came and everything?" 

She let a beat pass, and watched his expression turn to surprise, then pulled back as though she would punch him in the arm. "You weren't even there! You liar, you jerk! I hate you! You had a party and you didn't even go!" 

He threw up his hands to ward off her mostly ineffectual blows. "Stop, stop!" he cried. "Stop this!" 

Amanda sat down hard on the bench next to him and they both watched the empty cobbled street ahead of them. 

After a few moments passed, he spoke, offering an explanation, though he didn't have to. "Joe and the guys played a double set tonight, and you know, I really felt like some blues." He turned to her, concentrated on her eyes to lose the illusion of Rebecca, and added, "They played _Summertime_. Twice." 

"I am officially never speaking to you again," she pouted, and then broke her promise immediately. "I mean, Methos, I had to smash my favorite vase just to--and--and--oh my goodness," she said, rolling her eyes with the memory, "you'll never guess what I did to Sting." She grimaced with remembered humiliation. 

"Oh, did he come?" the Old Man asked, chewing on his lower lip. "Considered that sort of a long shot, actually." 

"Oh, come on inside," she pleaded, pounding her fists against his upper leg, "and I'll tell you all about it. I'm getting cold." 

Methos was still in no hurry to move from his place on the bench, although he did sit up straighter in response to her pummeling. 

He sighed, "nice of you to come by, Amanda," he said, "telling me about the party and everything. I'll look forward to receiving the bill for damages." And then he remembered, "Pascal didn't really get his jaw broken, did he?" 

"Well, not by the time I left," she confirmed. 

"Well, I hope you had a nice time, it was your party, after all. I just planned it." 

It was apparent that he was not going to invite her in, and Amanda couldn't stay out in the cold for the few hours left of the night--at least not without moving around some. She grabbed Rebecca's hat from where it had landed and positioned it on her head. 

Fine, she would--she didn't know what she would do, the night was entering its most awkward phase, when parties come to a stop, and working-folk have yet to rise. She couldn't go back to Sanctuary for awhile--those that hadn't left most likely would have passed out by now, and the idea of playing hopscotch around some hungover immortals, holy ground or not, held no appeal for her at all. 

"Well," she said to him, stalling her departure as long as she could. He had been right, about the party. _Imagine that, the Old Man being right about something that had nothing to do with ethics or mathematics or history! _It had taken her mind away from things for awhile, given her the excuse to liberate something from a secure facility, and even (as twisted as it sounded) given her the chance the spend a day with Rebecca. There was also the gift of the onyx ring, which she had worn tonight on her finger. She tried to work up how to go about saying thank you to someone like Methos. 

As she did that (sorting her thoughts looking more like stalling to him), he walked over to his door and took out a key to let himself in. Something was pricking at him now, in the part of himself that he least liked to acknowledge, somewhere in the region of the hole his conscience had left when he had assassinated it in the eleventh century. He scowled. Come to think of it, he had heard of tonsils growing back… 

"Amanda," he asked, though his tone sounded of greater parts resignation than cordiality, "would you like to come in?" Even more flatly he added, "maybe have a drink?" He knew statistically speaking that in all likelihood they would be bickering again in under three minutes. _Hell_, he thought, _three minutes is plenty long enough for a decent drink_. 

At his summons, Amanda was by his side at the door faster than he could turn the knob. She immediately assumed that the invitation was good for the rest of the night, and began planning for the dawn. "We could go to Mass," she offered, with newfound energy. "I promised Liam, it's only in an hour or two--or less." She had stepped through the doorway. "Or, if you've something more worldly in mind…do you know any good drinking games?" and she gave him a wink. "We can look at my tattoos." 

"Have you got a tattoo?" he asked, innocent as a lamb, his expression doubtful. 

"Oh my," she promised, "at the very least," and pulled him by the collar across the threshold and into the dark. 

* * *

Tattoos aside, it was, in fact, an hour before dawn, and if he was going to be dragged to Liam's Mass, Methos knew one thing; he was going to get some sleep--and company or no, he _wasn't_ giving up the bed. 

...the end...

* * *

* * *

**DISCLAIMERS**

**_Timeline: _**This story occurs at an indefinite time in _Highlander: The Series_ and _Highlander: The Raven_. I do think it happens, though, before _The Raven's_ Dead on Arrival, as there is too much angst in the wake of that for much of anything else.  
According to my "Best of Highlander" 2000 Desk Calendar, on October 30, 853, Amanda took her first head. It was in a discussion of this with Yakut that the idea for this story was born.   
In my Solstice story, The Gift of the Really Old Guy (http://www.royaltoby.com/shack/ROG.html), I briefly put Methos and Rebecca together in a relationship. It's my own, private fantasy.   
**_Characters:_** Everyone belongs to Panzer/Davis (except Julie Hart and Tomas). I would go out on a limb, however, and claim Pascal as at least my own "interpretation" of an originally one-note role on the series.   
Nick Wolfe isn't in the story, no hard feelings, he just isn't. In fact, I'm not sure where he is at this time--when he's out past curfew he rarely calls in to check with me. ;)   
**_Thanks:_** To Yakut, who clapped her virtual hands, chanting, "Story, story!"  
It belongs to her, and was written at her request--or rather insistence. She was also my beta. 

by: Neftzer (c) 2002.   
Feedback Appreciated. 

_For more Neftzer fiction (much that is not published here), please visit The OutBack Fiction Shack at http://www.royaltoby.com/shack , for an array of fiction and poetry from a variety of genres._


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